Two A&S Professors Earn Fulbrights

Continuing on in the tradition of international collaboration and research at the University of Cincinnati, two professors in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) have been named Fulbright scholars for the 2010-2011 academic year.

Judaic Studies Professor Steven Bowman and English Professor Don Bogen can each add (another) Fulbright Fellowship to their list of honors. Bogen will travel to Northern Ireland while Bowman visits Israel in 2011.

Professor Don Bogen, English and Comparative LiteratureBogen will travel to Queen’s University, Belfast in Northern Ireland as the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing. He will spend six months at their Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre giving readings and lectures, collaborating with Irish poets, and working on his fifth book of poetry, tentatively titled “Immediate Song.”

“I’m really honored to be at the Seamus Heaney Centre,” Bogen says. Heaney was one of the first poets Bogen ever met and his work is regularly taught in Bogen’s poetry courses.

“Just working with all the poets at the Heaney Centre will be special. It’ll be interesting working with them because even if we work in the same language, our cultures are tremendously different.”

Bogen, UC’s Nathaniel Ropes Chair in Comparative Literature, is already a Fulbright recipient. He earned a Fulbright Senior Lectureship to Spain in 2003 and multiple other awards from the Poetry Society of America, Camargo Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He’s published five books, more than 100 poems, and multiple translations. He is also the poetry editor for the Cincinnati Review and recently received the 2010 Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring Award by UC’s Graduate School.

Professor Steven Bowman, Judaic StudiesBowman will return to Jerusalem as part of the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Program. The award will allow him to lecture and conduct scholarly work in the United Kingdom and Israel for a manuscript about the Book of Yosippon. The book, a Hebrew rewriting of Josephus’s account of the Jewish War, was translated by Bowman and will be published by the Harvard University Press next year.

“I’ve already prepared the translation; this Fulbright will help me with the manuscript materials and scholarly monograph,” Bowman says. “My goal is to complete the manuscript and visit a few manuscript collections in France and Hungary.”

He, too, has already earned a Fulbright. In 1972 he was a Fulbright Fellow to Greece, visiting again in 1995 as a Senior Fulbright Professor. He also acted as a Fulbright Fellow in 1987 as part of the Western European Regional Research Program. Other awards Bowman has received include two grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Koerner Fellowship at Oxford University.